{"id":150,"date":"2018-06-04T00:14:17","date_gmt":"2018-06-04T04:14:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/interns.presidentwilson.org\/blog\/?p=150"},"modified":"2018-06-04T10:35:34","modified_gmt":"2018-06-04T14:35:34","slug":"week-one-may-29-june-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/interns.presidentwilson.org\/blog\/2018\/06\/04\/week-one-may-29-june-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Week One | May 29-June 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a 1914 speech to the National Press Club, Woodrow Wilson expressed \u201cI not only use all the brains I have, but all I can borrow…I am listening, I am diligently trying to collect all the brains that are borrowable in order that I may not make more blunders than it is inevitable that a man should make who has great limitations of knowledge and capacity.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

I admittedly don\u2019t know that much about the man himself, but I look forward to getting to know him over the next couple of weeks. World War I as a whole is a time period I\u2019m more familiar with having studied the literature produced during and after the Great War, so I\u2019m definitely looking forward to returning to the early 1900\u2019s, learning about Wilson\u2019s presidency and handling of the war on a more personal level, and also how the war affected the city of Staunton, if at all. <\/span><\/p>\n

Similarly, I don\u2019t have a lot of hands on experience in an actual archive. I\u2019ve done some volunteering at a local heritage center staffed purely by other volunteers where I observed and helped in that awkward peripheral kind of way, but couldn\u2019t quite get my hands dirty. So this week was exciting for me in that Mark let us hit the ground running; I never knew I\u2019d get so excited over giant folders with lots of smaller folders inside at 10 o\u2019clock in the morning. <\/span><\/p>\n

About half of the archive\u2019s photo collection, having previously been digitized by another intern, was publicly available online. The other half was still private, lonely digitized images waiting for more bits and pieces to be added to them in order to be published for public viewing. Through Omeka, a web-based publishing platform mostly used in libraries, museums, and archives, Mark had us inputting data for the title, creator, data, source, and contributor Dublin Core fields in addition to each image\u2019s physical dimensions.<\/span><\/p>\n

Honestly, I was kind of relieved to see the Dublin Core fields since I just finished a whole spring semester\u2019s worth of studying metadata where DC was basically all we practiced with in addition to MODS and VRA Core 4.0, the latter of which I did not get along with. At all. Ironically, our class didn\u2019t really touch on encoded archival description (EAD) beyond the basic reading about it, knowing about it, and moving on. Because of this I\u2019m hoping to actually try it out, to maybe make a finding aid or something since I feel like I\u2019m going to need it later down the line. I won\u2019t complain about Dublin Core though; it\u2019s so user friendly and easy to follow along and Omeka\u2019s interface is actually really nice and fun to use. <\/span><\/p>\n

I want to say that in just a week I\u2019ve gotten through maybe…200 items? Honestly, the best part of each day is finding out what\u2019s in each folder, so lots of super small moments that add up in three and a half hours. There\u2019s a small label tag with a very brief description such as \u201cWorld War I\u201d or \u201cVersailles Peace Conference\u201d, but sometimes what\u2019s inside is so much more than that. Something described as just \u201cWorld War I\u201d could actually be a field full of soldiers on horseback or with a group of cannons so then you have to think of what to actually title the digitized image to best convey what it\u2019s about. I\u2019m not generally someone who likes surprises, but I like these. I try not to \u2018ohh\u2019 and \u2018ahh\u2019 too much, but sometimes it\u2019s hard not to, especially when you\u2019re holding actual photographs from 1912 that someone\u2019s physically written a note on the back of. It\u2019s the little things. <\/span><\/p>\n

I actually like what I\u2019m doing and I like working with Mark. I\u2019ve yet to be bored — slightly unnerved by the creaky silence of the Library and Research Center building — but I\u2019m actually motivated to get up in the morning, to drive 45 minutes to get to WWPL, and to open folders and find out what\u2019s inside; to piece together the life of man born in Staunton as told through photographs. To use my brain to the best of its ability and to put all the things I\u2019ve been studying for the past two years to use, to borrow\u00a0 Mark\u2019s brain to find out what all he knows that he can teach to me. <\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m excited to find out what comes after we finish up with the photo collection, but I already know I’m going to miss it.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a 1914 speech to the National Press Club, Woodrow Wilson expressed \u201cI not only use all the brains I have, but all I can borrow…I am listening, I am diligently trying to collect all the brains that are borrowable in order that I may not make more blunders than it is inevitable that a … Continue reading “Week One | May 29-June 1”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/interns.presidentwilson.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/interns.presidentwilson.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/interns.presidentwilson.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/interns.presidentwilson.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/interns.presidentwilson.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/interns.presidentwilson.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":152,"href":"https:\/\/interns.presidentwilson.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions\/152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/interns.presidentwilson.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/interns.presidentwilson.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/interns.presidentwilson.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}